This invention relates to liquid immersion development (LID) reproduction machines, and more particularly to such a machine having a reliable, non-sliding transfusing assembly for producing high quality transfused toner images by preventing intermediate belt sliding and slippage, as well as, image smearing that would other wise result from conventional belt transfusing assemblies.
Liquid electrostatographic reproduction machines are well known, and generally each includes an image bearing member or photoreceptor having an image bearing surface on which latent images are formed and developed as single color or multiple color toner images for eventual transfer to a receiver substrate or copy sheet. Each such reproduction machine thus includes a development system or systems that each utilizes a low solids content liquid developer material typically having about 2 percent by weight of fine solid particulate toner material of a particular color, dispersed in a hydrocarbon liquid carrier for developing latent images on the photoreceptor.
The developed images on the photoreceptor typically each contain only a low solids content of about 8 to 12 percent by weight of the toner particles in the hydrocarbon liquid carrier. Typically, the developed toner image or images at such a low concentration are metered and conditioned, and then transferred from the image bearing surface to an intermediate transfer member for example, and then hot or heat transferred from the intermediate transfer member to an image receiver substrate or copy sheet.
Because the metering and conditioning functions to go from a low solids content image to a high solids content image are conventionally carried out on the photoreceptor, this conventionally results in undesirably long photoreceptors, and hence correspondingly long or large machine footprints. Additionally, in image-on-image (IOI) multicolor machines, it is the image being built up on the photoreceptor that has to be conditioned, usually resulting in unacceptable degrees of image smear and cross-color contamination.
There is therefore a need for a LID reproduction machine that eliminates image conditioning on the photoreceptor and avoids at least the conventional problems above, thus resulting advantageously in relatively shorter photoreceptors, and improved IOI image quality.